Search tools for advancing through information provided in a database have been available for years. Generally, in such applications, a user's responses direct progress through the layers of available information. The interaction follows one of a plurality of pre-set paths along a decision tree, with the user input typically being limited as responses to pre-defined choices. As an example, so-called "expert systems," such as searchable on-line medical databases, are navigated via responses to system prompts regarding symptoms which are tied to various diagnoses in a relational database. Interactive on-line catalog sales applications utilize user responses to questions, which may directly or indirectly relate to products in the catalog. The user may indicate his or her interest in defined categories of product information and then be provided with appropriate screens displaying available product from the database.
Shortcomings of available prior art search and query tools include the fact that all users must interact with the system using a limited set of pre-established interactions. Necessarily the pre-established interactions are predisposed toward a particular type of customer and cannot effectively meet the needs of a larger audience of users that may have an interest in the information. In addition, all users must navigate through the pre-set paths and iterations to obtain information regarding features of the available products.
Different users will also have different interaction parameters with respect to the level of product detail that they require. For example, when shopping for a computer, a professional programmer will approach the interaction with more detailed specification requirements than will a user who is shopping for a home computer for "recreational" use. Finally, the details of the actual display of product information should ideally differ depending upon the user, the user's needs, and the user's knowledge in the area. An inventive electronic catalog system has been developed, and is the subject of co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/987,214, filed Dec. 9, 1997, which was based on is now U.S. Pat. No. 6,076,091, provisional patent application Ser. No. 60/032,543, entitled "METHOD AND SYSTEM which is the subject of U.S. Pat. No. 6,076,091 which issued on Jun. 13, 2000, FOR PROVIDING A FLEXIBLE AND EXTENSIBLE ON-LINE ELECTRONIC CATALOG," which was filed on Dec. 10, 1996 and is assigned to the present assignee (hereinafter referred to as "assignee's system"). In that application, the inventors detailed an electronic catalog system which provides the user with the ability to interact at a user-defined level of detail, in the user's preferred language, and with user-directed queries, as opposed to the relatively static prior art interaction systems. Particularly significant to the assignee's system is the ability for meaningful interactions at the user's level of product awareness, so that the user does not have to step through a series of query interactions which are too fundamental, or too advanced, for the user's level of interest and/or knowledge.
Queries input to presently available electronic catalogs had, in the past, been limited to responding to system-generated "yes-no" questions, or to inputting specific product feature details; for example, inputting "memory=4" would obtain product information about systems which have exactly 4 MB of memory. Such queries could only provide limited information to the user, and would not allow for retrieval of all of the relevant information which may be desired by the user, and which would be available in the assignee's system. The "memory=4" query noted above will, using prior art search tools, retrieve all systems which are available for sale with exactly 4 Mb of memory. It may be, however, that the user wishes to obtain information about all available systems which have at least 4 Mb of memory. Inexact or inequality searching requires additional searching steps and additional characterization of product data which would not otherwise be maintained under the prior art electronic catalog methods and systems.
Prior art systems are not only unable to respond to inequality queries, but are also ill-equipped to respond to successive user-defined refinements of queries. For example, when the user is choosing the search parameters for searching in a web-based Common Gateway Interface (CGI), and the search parameters are input in random order, such that the user is not following a pre-set path along a system decision tree, the CGI will not retain information regarding the user's preceding refinements/parameters and is, therefore, unable to support the iterative query. In addition, at the graphical user interface (GUI) level, prior art systems based on hypertext mark-up language (HTML) do not readily allow for the graphical expression required to support the preferred user interaction involving inequalities.
It is therefore an objective of the present invention to provide an on-line catalog interaction methodology to support inequality searching for retrieval of product information.
It is another objective of the invention to provide an extensible system to characterize product data for retrieval based upon an inequality search.
Still another objective of the invention is to provide data collection, categorization and searching methodologies which support inequality searching for retrieval of product information.
Yet another objective of the invention is to provide for on-line product searching which involves multiple iterations for user refinement of the query.